Post #171
Adding in tabs, blogmarks and a blogroll
19th January 2004, early evening | Comments (19)
Amidst the madness of being inside all day, drinking tea, and tidying up my collection of pens, I’ve found time to make a few small changes on the site.
Tabs, blogroll and blogmarks
You’ll see that I’ve added in extra content to the right hand column. I now have a list of blogmarks (links that don’t warrant a full posting here but which are interesting none the less) and a blogroll (a list of sites I read on a regular basis).
I’ve wanted to add those features in for a while now, but didn’t want to compromise the ‘clean look’ this site has.
In the end, (and after an awful lot of analyses of my own browsing habits) I decided that these new elements could happily reside behind a tabbed interface. My thinking was that when you want them, you want them, and when you don’t, you don’t need to see them at all.
Mark Wubben very kindly stepped in to rescue my feeble efforts at coding the tabs in Javascript, producing a script that seems to work perfectly in all my target browsers.
Those people without Javascript-support don’t miss out on content — they get all three blocks of content (the nav, the blogmarks, and the blogroll) in one, traditional, straight column.
This follows the rules that Peter-Paul Koch suggested in his article:
- The site should still work when the browser doesn’t support Javascript.
- The script should still work when the browser doesn’t support CSS.
- Styles that hide content and are meant to be overruled by a script, should be set in Javascript.
New blogmarks
To save you wasting a mouse-click, I’ve set things up so a little asterisk appears in the blogmarks tab when new content has been posted.
A cookie is set whenever you click the b-marks tab, and the time and date of this is compared to the time and date of the latest blogmark. If the blogmark date is newer than your cookie date, you get the little *.
You might also notice that blogmarks posted since your last visited have a different colour list-dot. (If this is too subtle, can you let me know please?)
I'm looking to add the ‘*’ notification into the blogroll tab as well.
One colour for day, one for night
At the suggestion of Mark Wubben (a handy man to have around, so it would seem), I’ve altered the colour of the panorama border (and added in a little drop shadow) to take into account the time of day. At night we now have a subdued colour bar, and during the day a brighter, bluer version.
Fixes for IE
The delight that is IE gets fairly sparse service on this site, as I tend to expend my efforts on the Mozilla/Firebird front.
However, Holly Marie was kind enough to step in and offer up a few hacks that should mean things look a little prettier here in that browser. Specifically floating images and the list item numbers for comments have been fixed.
New goodies
If all goes to plan I should be unveiling some other bits and bobs soon, making the site easier to search, and letting all the kind commentors have easy and flexible access to their contributions.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
As always, any feedback (negative as well as positive) is more than welcome.
Jump up to the start of the post ↑
Blogmarks
A collection of miscellaneous links that don't merit a main blog posting, but which are interesting none-the-less.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
— George W Bush (9)- What WordPress is doing to combat comment spam. (1)
- Mobile web tools, from Pukupi. (1)
- Pukupi’s top 10 hints for building interoperable mobile Web sites. (3)
- The photography of E.J. Peiker. (4)
Stuff from the intersection of design, culture and technology.
(3)- Some handy tips for advanced Google use. (35)
- Make your own church signs, or view some real ones. (8)
- Michael Heilemann is doing a great job with his new WordPress theme; Kubrick. (1)
- I’m late to the party, but Dan has a book out. (1)
- What a crazy concept for laying out housing estates. (3)
- In San Francisco, I live here. (Try the zoom feature.) (1)
- Spider-Man reviews crayons. [Via] (3)
- Some beautiful images from photographer Greg Downing. (2)
- Lots of links, from the Link Bunnies. (1)
- Nice “when I was a child” sort of post from Stuart. (1)
- How much does SafariSorter cost? (4)
- Some handy maintenance tips for Mac owners running Panther. (2)
- Alex King launches Use Tasks: a hosted service for Tasks and Tasks Pro™. (2)
- Min Jung, Anil Dash, and I get interviewed for HBO’s Real Sex. (10)
Blog-roll
A selection of blogs I read on a regular basis.
- Hmm, the blog-roll seems to be a little bit broken right now (it may be that the blo.gs service is having problems). I’ve sent myself an email about this problem, and will try to fix it ASAP.